Cancer patients who received a COVID-19 mRNA vaccine within 100 days of starting an immunotherapy treatment for advanced forms of lung cancer or melanoma lived significantly longer than those who didn’t receive the vaccine, a new University of Florida study has found.
For the last 12 years, we’ve been working
on personalized mRNA cancer vaccines. Over this time, we made an absolutely
fascinating discovery — which is, even if the mRNA is completely
nonspecific to a patient’s cancer, that mRNA could wake up the sleeping giant
that is the immune system to fight cancer. We discovered this in mouse models, and a
brilliant graduate student who was working with us, Adam Grippin, who is now at MD
Anderson, asked a brilliant question, which is: If nonspecific mRNA vaccines can
wake up the immune system against cancer, what happens to patients receiving
the COVID-19 mRNA vaccine? What happens to those patients who are also
receiving conventional immunotherapies? And the results were absolutely remarkable.
Patients with some of the most aggressive forms of skin and lung cancer had a near doubling
in survival outcome if they received these COVID-19 mRNA vaccines within 100 days of
also receiving conventional immunotherapy. This is one of the most exciting
observations I have seen in my 20-year career as a cancer researcher. I think the confirmatory work in a prospective
trial is of the utmost importance and urgency. The notion that we may be able to use
a simple vaccine to awaken a patient’s immune response to better fight their
disease may totally change the way we think about treating cancer
for the foreseeable future. Now, through the OneFlorida consortium, we’re
working to prove these results definitively, in a Phase 3, randomized controlled trial. And if proven to be true, this could revolutionize
the field of cancer by allowing something like a universal cancer vaccine to be instantly available
to patients around the globe to wake up their immune system — and now keep it active with
some of the conventional therapies available.
